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Gallium3D LLVMpipe Starts To Smoke

Phoronix: Gallium3D LLVMpipe Starts To Smoke

While it's rare for a few days to pass at Phoronix without pulling the latest development code for Mesa / Gallium3D and the Linux kernel DRM in order to run updated Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau Linux graphics benchmarks, LLVMpipe isn't benchmarked as commonly. LLVMpipe is the new CPU-based software acceleration method for the Gallium3D that leverages the Low-Level Virtual Machine to provide better performance than the classic Mesa software rasterizer or Softpipe. Fortunately, upon running a brand new set of tests, the results show a bit more promise but there is still much work ahead.

It's nice to see the state of llvmpipe, and it's very impressive for a purely software renderer. But how on Earth did you manage to get 20 fps with HD 5450 in OpenArena?

I get close to 60fps in 1080p with an HD 4550 (which is about equal in terms of performance), and this has been the case for about a year. 25fps at 1024x768 is something I can't achieve even with low power profile and anti-performance tweaks.

Since all tests but one are capped at exactly 60 fps, I'm guessing it's the vsync issue again.

Why comparing LLVMpipe (which is a software pipe) to RadeonHD and Nouveau (which are hardware accelerated pipes) ?
Why not comparing LLVMpipe to Mesa, to see the real improvements between the two solutions?

These are real questions, I might have misunderstood some subtlety about the rendering pipe...

Why comparing LLVMpipe (which is a software pipe) to RadeonHD and Nouveau (which are hardware accelerated pipes) ?
Why not comparing LLVMpipe to Mesa, to see the real improvements between the two solutions?

These are real questions, I might have misunderstood some subtlety about the rendering pipe...

That first OpenArena test looks a bit suspicious to me. Not in the testing methodology, but that we may have an opportunity to identify a CPU bottleneck in the Gallium/LLVM/Radeon architecture.

One of these days I'm hoping to starting profiling the r600 driver to see if there's any way I can help. Otherwise, I'll probably start working on fleshing out the GSoC clover implementation a bit (implementing built-in math functions and stuff, conformance testing, etc).

BTW... I'd like to buy a new graphic card, is it good to take an ATI now? I prefer their "open" policy, but I don't know if the open source driver is good enough.
For instance, I have an nVidia card at the moment and if I use Nouveau, the temperature gets higher and higher, way above 100°C.
It took me some time to understand why my PC was freezing without any reason...

Since RadeonHD drivers are based on open specs and aren't retro-engineered, are they more stable?